A Closer Look at Legacy 1.2

24Apr

With the legacy system finally in place, and having had a little time to actually play around with it now, I wanted to take another look at the legacy perks that came through in the live patch to look again at what options we have for unlocking and just how much it’s going to cost me to get my hands on it. Some of the features that you can unlock are relatively easy to get, some harder, some are fairly cheap, and some are mindbogglingly expensive.

I’m going to look at the entire legacy system here, so I’ll also touch just a little bit on the family tree, then we’ll get into the global unlocks which is where the price analysis will come into play, and we’ll wrap it up with a quick look at the Coming Soon tab of the legacy screenFamily Tree
The family tree portion is the one I care about the least because it does absolutely nothing at this point. It does work, it lets you put people up there and assign them to different relationships to your other characters, but what relationships are there have no impact at all on game play so it’s purely a vanity feature. That said, I do actually fill out my trees, even if I only do it because seeing it blank when I pull up the legacy tree is like staring at a puzzle just waiting for me to put it together.

I think they did a decent job with the family tree and giving us options for which relationships to form. My major gripe with the family tree is that you can’t assign multiple people to the majority of the positions within the tree. I can understand that for spouse, but for something like Rival? I have seven Republic characters and one Empire character on the same server, so I’d really like to make that Imperial a rival to several of the other characters, but I can’t.

Other than that, I think they did a good job with the family tree for what it is.

Imperial and Republic Classes
Each class has two features that unlock after you finish Chapter 2, one that you unlock for finishing Chapter 3, and then a total of five that represents each of your non-ship droid companions after you finish all of their quests (which takes anywhere from 9,250 – 10,000 affection each).

The /ClassName Emotes
Requires: Complete Chapter 2
Alternative: None

I haven’t seen all of these yet because I only have two classes above chapter 2 (Consular, Warrior). The two that I do have are sort of cool considering what they are. I liked that I was able to use the /warrior emote on a Jedi Consular Shadow and have my glowy red fists of doom that had my wife asking me what the crap I was doing. These emotes are really short and give just a little hint to the fact that you’ve leveled a character of another class, and I actually enjoy having them.

Personally, I would like to see these opened up for completing chapter 1 instead of 2. Since it’s another purely vanity reward it doesn’t hurt to give it earlier than it currently is, and I think something nice and small like this would be suitable for having finished the first chapter.

Class Buffs
Requires: Complete Chapter 2
Alternative: None

This is one of my favorite features, honestly. It’s such a minor thing in the long run, but as someone who likes to focus on leveling I just really like being able to make my characters stronger. I like big buffs and I cannot lie. I like having access to all class buffs with a single class, so I’m a big fan. It lets me not have to worry about whether or not everyone’s caught up on their buffs when I’m grouped up, I just cast my own and know that we’re all good.

Heroic Class Ability
Requires: Complete Chapter 3
Alternative: None

Each class that you complete chapter 3 with will unlock a special version of a signature spell that you can use on your alts during their Heroic Moment cooldown. These spells are in no way balanced against each other, they simply took the coolest spells they could from each class that would make at least some amount of sense on all of the other classes and threw it out there.

Despite some of these spells being underwhelming for me on a personal level, I think the idea of this feature as a whole was really well done and it was implemented pretty well too. Right now I only have one of these unlocked on my servers, which is the Consular’s Project spell. Shortly after receiving it though I started focusing on another pair of alts with my wife on another server so I haven’t had a chance to actually use it yet.

Could they have chosen better spells? In some cases, I would say yes and in others I think they nailed it. Overall though, any complaints that I had about their spell selection in the past were just me being picky. Taking another look at it, I think it’s a job well done.

Companion Quest Bonuses
Requires: Completion of all conversations and quests with this companion
Alternative: None

If you do this with all five companion types you end up with an extra minute on the duration of your Heroic Moment and a 5 minute reduction to the cooldown.

The first time you unlock this feature for each of those five types of companions gives you a specific buff (see list above). Also, every time you complete this requirement for any companion, even duplicates of the same type (but not the same class), you’ll receive a +10 Presence buff to all of your characters. So each of the buffs mentioned in the list above can be obtained only once per Legacy, but you get a +10 Presence buff for every companion for a total +400 Presence if you finish all 40 companions.

Species
The species unlock was one of my primary objections to Legacy as an altoholic because of our restricted character slots. There are nine species to choose from, but only eight character slots so you can’t unlock them all without deleting characters (unless you want to pay credits to unlock them instead), and even if you did level all of the races in order to unlock them all then you’d be out of character slots to actually use them for. Bioware has stated that they’re looking into ways to expand the character slots, so while it’s still a concern because it hasn’t been addressed yet and the plans could fall through, I’ve got faith that Bioware actually listens to their customers and will follow through.

Unlocking a species makes that species an available choice for all classes. In some cases, such as Cyborgs, it also unlocks additional character creation customization options.

You unlock a species by reaching level 50 with a character of that species. Alternatively, you can spend credits to unlock this if you’ve reached at least Legacy Level 5. The cost is 1,500,000 credits for each race except for Humans which costs only 500,000 credits. Unlocking the Human species also gives you a +100 Presence bonus for all of your characters since the Human species can already be used for all classes.

From an altoholic’s perspective, it still sucks that there are nine races but only eight character slots, but again I have faith that they are going to address it. All that aside, I think the addition of a feature like this is fantastic. One thing that still bugs me to this day about WoW is that there are restrictions on race and class combinations, and I am thrilled that this feature exits in SWTOR and truly wish that WoW would embrace the concept.

In regards to the alternative method of unlocking these, I think 1.5 million credits is a bit too high. On the one hand, people who are going to pay to unlock the features probably aren’t the ones who are also going to want to unlock them all. There will be exceptions to that of course, but in general I think the people who would rather pay to unlock them would only want one or two unlocked. Even then, I think 1.5 million is a bit high. Overall, it costs 12.5 million credits to unlock all nine races if you go that route, and that’s pushing insanity in terms of money sinks.

Other
There are a lot of different features unlocked in this section, so we’ll break it down and look at each group individually.

Legacy of Unity: Reduces the damage taken by you and your companion for a short duration
Requires: Level 50 and Light V or above
Alternative: 250,000 and Legacy Level 10

I don’t have either of these unlocked yet, so I haven’t used them myself to see how effective they are. I do like that these are tied into companions though which means it’s one more thing that can’t be abused by raid leaders requiring their members to have a certain alignment in order to get a special buff and so on. These features don’t necessarily scream light side or dark side to me, but as far as unlocking features goes I think these are both nice options to include so I think they did a good job with them.

I tried to think of what might be a better fit for these two, and I really couldn’t come up with anything fantastic. The only idea that came to mind at all really was to give a buff to LS/DS gains on your other alts so that you could reach the different ranks faster on them.

The Repair Droid deserves a special mention because it sells Sensor mods for your C2-N2 and 2V-R8 ship droids that gives them bonuses to crew skills. I’ll direct you to Dulfy’s blog for information on which units exist. One of the sensors is particularly worthy of note because it gives +5 Cybertech Crit which none of the existing companions have. Beyond those items, this is primarily a convenience benefit. The 1 million credit price tag is incredibly high in my opinion unless you can get a return on your investment from the droid mods to make up that money in a short time. Selling trash is already as simple as clicking a button and waiting 60 seconds for a companion to do it for you from anywhere in the world.

The mailbox and GTN kiosk are both convenience, and personally I won’t bother buying either of them unless I find myself suddenly rich and have no reason not to buy them just to spend the cash. The cost on that GTN kiosk is insane if you ask me. I understand the convenience of always having one close to you, but I do all of my auctioning on a single alt to whom all of my items are mailed and he’s perpetually by the GTN anyway. Five million credits for a little slice of convenience to players who will most likely spend the majority of their time on the Fleet anyway is just absurd.

Training Dummies can be really beneficial to people who like to maximize their performance for raiding or warzones, which they can actually do now that we have combat log functionality. Prices aren’t too terrible for these, I guess. I think they should put some free to use ones out in the worlds/fleet somewhere in addition to these and then have purchasable ones opened up on the guild capitol ships once those become available as well so that guilds can practice together by themselves.

These are all just fun little moves that you can do to box with your friends. It’s the perfect kind of vanity reward for the game, and even though not everyone is going to want to sit around and punch their friends in the face I think this was the perfect example of a set of legacy features that are both easy to earn and also easy to purchase.

While farming DNA during the Rakghoul event on Tatooine we entertained ourselves with fist fights while waiting for our infections to reach stage 2 and it was a lot of fun. Things like this add more flavor and fun little quirkiness to the game.

The Legacy Fleet Pass and Legacy Travel features are both really cool in their general concept, which is lowering cooldown times. I don’t think the amount of time is enough for me to personally want to pay 600,000 credits to unlock them all though. If the cooldown for Quick Travel was reduced by 10-15 minutes total instead of only 6, then I might be more tempted to get it. But still, at 600k I have to consider just how many times I’ve needed to use QT and have it be on cooldown for less than 6 minutes. I can think of four or five, which means there’s probably been a dozen or more in reality, and all of those times I either used my fleet pass instead or just hopped a flight and spent an extra 30 seconds getting to where I was going. Personally, I think these are either a tad over priced or more likely too small of a reduction to really be worth it.

For the Emergency Fleet Pass though, there’s no way I would invest any amount of money in reducing that cooldown unless it could be reduced to no longer 1 hour at most. For 600,000 credits I can buy 600 regular fleet passes that cooldown in only one hour, and in four months I’ve used less than 10 of those. Either the cost should be significantly reduced on these or the amount of time reduced should be significantly increased or else these three features are a total waste.

Rocket Boost is one of the features I was most looking forward to, but with a 2 million credit price tag that sucker can wait. I haven’t unlocked it and I’ve only seen/known one person who has, but this one seems incredibly over priced to me. That better be one heck of a speed boost and usable in PvP for me to spend that kind of money on it. And oh, the hell that will be raised if they do allow it in PvP. I saw confirmation today that you cannot use the Rocket Boost in PvP or while in combat, which is good for PvP, but which completely removes any chance that I’m going to spend 2 million credits on this. Unless it moves faster than speeders do and its duration is long enough that I can get from one city to another on a map, then this thing is just ridiculous. Seriously? 2 million? Make it 200,000 and then I’ll buy it.

This is basically a vanity sprint spell. It’ll get you from point A to point B faster than most of the other methods of travel you’ve got, but it can’t be used in any setting in which having a speed boost is truly beneficial to your character (no combat, no PvP) which greatly reduces the usefulness. Instead it becomes a way to look cool while you’re moving around when it’s not on cooldown, and that’s about it.

The companion dance option is fun and one that a lot of people were looking forward to. Unfortunately, the dance doesn’t loop so you only dance for about 5 seconds and then you stop which makes it a bit less interesting. The good thing is it currently will continue to play the dance even if you start moving which is kinda fun.

I haven’t seen any of the other three groups of emotes, so I can’t say anything about them. As emotes are pure vanity, I’d say prices are fairly reasonable for those who will be interested in that sort of thing.

With patch 1.2 they significantly increased how quickly you build social ranks, so earning these without paying the price will be much easier. Particularly if you’re willing to roll a fresh character with at least 1 other person to party with you through the leveling process. My level 50 character is still Social 1, but a level 19 alt I rolled over the weekend is almost halfway to Social 3.

Coming Soon
Overall, I like what the Legacy System has to offer in 1.2, though I don’t care for the majority of their pricing to unlock the features that cannot otherwise be earned. As I mentioned in going over them above, there are a few suggestions I would make to improve some of them but I’m only one player in a sea of players.

There are several additional legacy features that are set up in the “Coming Soon” tab as well. The assumption is that they will be included in patch 1.3, but I don’t think we’ve received official confirmation on that. At least, not for all of them.

Some of the coming soon features are ones that I’m really looking forward to, which I’ll go over here in a moment. First, let’s take a look at what the future has in store:

Extra experience for doing the things you want to do is an absolute win in my book. My assumption is that these will each provide either 1% or 2% per rank that you unlock, for a total of 5-10% increased experience. I haven’t sat down and explored experience gains from each activity enough to know exactly how much difference there is between each one and questing to see if my assumed numbers are either too low or too high, but I would be surprised to see much more than that.

With no information on how to unlock them, I can’t say much about that aspect of it. From what I’ve seen in 1.2 so far, I expect the prices on these to be equally ridiculous if I’m being completely honest. I very much doubt that they are going to make them easily accessible.

Faster movement speed is king in MMO’s. Faster run speed and earlier access to mounts are both pure win in my books. I would imagine we’re going to spend somewhere between 1-2.5 million on the sprint speed increases, if not more, and I would be very surprised if they didn’t charge at least 2.5-5 million for the reduced speeder level based on current pricing.

I like what we have in store for Companions in the future. Selling junk faster is just about worthless to me with how few areas there are in the game that have lots of mobs to drop stuff and no vendor to sell to. I do run out of space, don’t get me wrong, but it happens so very seldom that I wouldn’t even consider buying that one unless I was overflowing with credits and had nothing better to do with it.

Increasing affection gains and critical crafting success are both fantastic ideas. Again, I’m sure the price tags are going to be astronomical, but I’ll certainly work towards them. My priority from this list will be Crafting first and then I’ll probably rotate the other two since I like to do a combination of both methods when getting affection with my companions.

ConvenienceRepair Droid 1/2/3: Creates a repair droid that you and allies can use to repair gear in the field.Priority Medevac 1/2: Return at increased health after dying and respawning at a med center.Field Respec: Reset your skill tree in the field.Portable Mailbox: Drop a mailbox in the field for you and your allies to use.

Here we see that everyone will have access to the SWTOR version of Jeeves as long as they can afford it. I’m going to assume that the different versions of the droid either have progressively shorter cooldowns, better pricing, or they’ll sell a better variety or more useful items.

The Priority Medevac is incredibly stupid from how I’m reading it. Respawning at a med center means that you’re spawning at a safe location where you can spend a few seconds to recoup your full health and mana for free. Unless someone is dying at an unfathomably frequent rate then I don’t see where there’s any appeal at all in this feature, much less two different ranks of it. If you unlock this one by dying 500 deaths or something then I’ll get it, but if you have to pay credits then anything over about 500 credits would be asking too much in my opinion.

Field Respec is a fantastic idea though, so I’ll give full props on that one. There’s a ton of time to be saved by being able to respec on the fly rather than returning to the fleet, and in situations like raiding it’s truly invaluable. For me, I just like being able to change as the situation demands, and I hope the cooldown on this thing isn’t too terrible and they just leave the credit cost as the speed bump for using it often.

Portable Mailbox is another fun convenience feature. It doesn’t appeal to me nearly as much in SWTOR as it did in WoW, mostly because there’s no real farming to be done in SWTOR. The only reason I would need a mailbox randomly while out in the middle of nowhere is if I’ve been farming kills and my bags are full of items that need to be reverse engineered, and those places don’t exist in this game. This is one that’s much like the GTN kiosk that’s in 1.2 right now, where it’s cool to have it but at the same time it’s so completely unnecessary that without a very small price tag on it there’s no reason for me to buy it.

8 responses to “A Closer Look at Legacy 1.2”

For those features that have ??? listed as their cost, those are ones that I have unlocked on all of my open legacies and cannot see the costs because they’re already unlocked for me. I do plan to get those values for the sake of completion, but I don’t have them right now.

Another thrilling piece of writing and an astute summary of the Legecy features. However, I disagree with you in two points:

(1) Many of the features that you consider “overpriced” could be seen as long-term goals. It should take at least some amout of time to be able to unlock them. Also, as an altoholic credits should come fairly easy. I think the game practically showers players with money which is even more abundant now that the cost of training has been reduced.

(2) I can understand why people would like to have all race/class restrictions lifted, but I cannot agree with that. I think that WoW already went too far in that direction by allowing too many race/class combinations. Restrictions serve a purpose in that they help shaping the identity of races and/or classes.

Finally, I agree with you that the Legacy System is a great addition to the game. It offers lots of possibilities and the family trees make for good role-playing. However, I strongly dislike the server limitation. An account-wide model would have been so much better. Also, I cannot come to terms with Non-Force-users being able to use Force Powers.

I don’t disagree on the point of there being a need for long term goals. I’m not calling them overpriced from a “I want to be able to buy them all at once” perspective, but rather from a return on investment perspective. If I’m going to pay 5 million credits for something that I easily have access to elsewhere, then that better be one hell of a GTN kiosk. As in, it better have lower fees taken out or something similar to make up for spending 5 million credits on it because there’s no way the minor convenience of having one on my ship is ever going to make up for the ludicrous price.

I don’t mind things having a big price tag, but if it’s going to cost a large amount of credits the it needs to be worth the price, and in my opinion not one of the expensive ones are anywhere near being worth their current prices.

I can see the argument for restrictions on race/class combos in WoW because I’ve had this discussion several times over in the past. I don’t agree with it from a player perspective, but I can understand the support for it from those who care deeply about the lore. I understand people’s desire for it even though I don’t agree. I could go into detail about it again to show you how almost every combination either already exists or has existed in the past, but again I’ve already been through that. However, when it comes to Star Wars I stand very firmly behind my opinion that the restrictions in this world have no place. If there were a race said to be physically/mentally/biologically unable to use the force then so be it, they can’t be force classes because it’s literally written into their being that they cannot, but none of the races we have available fit that.

I’m definitely in agreement with you on Legacy should be account-wide rather than server-wide. I have established a legacy on three different servers and would very much like to have them all tied together rather than having to level them all individually. Unlocking the class portions isn’t /too/ terrible since I like to level anyway, but the ones that require certain legacy levels and large amounts of credits are killer.

Non-force classes using force abilities via Legacy unlocks works for me. Just because I choose to professionally become a Trooper doesn’t mean that I’m not Force sensitive or that I didn’t have training as a Jedi when I was younger. Your class doesn’t define who/what your character is, it only defines the rules that you follow within the game. Is it a bit of a stretch? Sure. But, I think it still works well within the setting.

I totally agree on the point of non-forace calsses getting legacy force abilities. From a lore perspective, there are a lot of people who are force-sensitive but have not received Jedi or Sith training. You’re right about the prices for the legacy features.

OK, basically I agree with just about everything in this post. I personally think there is very little for affirmed altoholics. It is an incentive for non-altoholics to create alts.

I would agree. The only thing that’s really already altoholic friendly that’s in this system right now is the species unlocks which of course has all kinds of things wrong with it from the alt perspective.

I can understand to some extent, though. Phase 1 of the legacy system gets people in the mood to roll alts, and then 1.3 brings phase 2 which rewards people for actually having alts.

I guess. My problem was that, other than a couple of alts I made changes to, I already had a fairly strong concept of the charactersI wanted to play, based on the currently available choices. Those last couple I have already created or changed and their character has solidied in my mind. Adding available races is meaningless. I don’t have room for more alts on SotE, and creating them on another server does me no good. But that’s just me.